MapFactor Forum

once per month

Geofabrik releases are once per day, not once per month...

http://download.geofabrik.de/europe.html

There is a misconception here.

To start with: I'm very happy to have a new map every month.

Geofabrik and planet.openstreetmap both deliver in the osm.pbf format.
The difference between planet.openstreetmap.org and Geofabrik is that planet delivers once a week a complete planet file (and a diff) and Geofabrik delivers every night region (continent) files and country/subcountry files.

MapFactor does not need to pay GeoFabrik for conversions: they can do it themselves as it is the same format they use now.

As Oldie already explains: The osm.pbf format is a data format not suitable for routing, etc. That's why MapFactor needs to convert it to their own format (like every other OSM based nav app has to do).
As said: the osm.pbf files contain everything. MapFactor does a huge "data" trimming and removes lots and lots of data. OsmAnd maps for example contain more data but are also 3-6 times as big.

I assume that MapFactor first extracts regions and countries from the planet file (using osmconvert??), and create their maps from this extracted countries. As it is a closed format I have no idea how they create their maps and how time-consuming the process is. And I though to have read somewhere that they work from a database, mysql (using osmosis?) or postgresql (using osm2postgresql?), and create the maps from there, which means that they have an extra conversion step. It could also mean that they import the entire planet file into the database which is less efficient (from time perspective) as dealing with the smaller country files.

:) thanks hvdwolf - it is as you wrote: conversion of XML.bz2 to some global binary data (phase0), splitting into parts based on relation IDs (countries/regions, phase1) and "standard conversion step" from internal MapFactor meta data format (MFF in MySQL) into binary MCA
p.s. currently is running phase0 on planet141008.osm